Eric Adams Cuts New York’s Sanctuary-City Losses

N ew York City mayor Eric Adams announced the end of an era this week: Gotham will put its experiment as a “sanctuary city” to an end.

“We have no more room in the city,” Adams declared at a press conference on Wednesday. In what the New York Times described as a “somewhat unexpected departure,” the Adams administration announced that the city would no longer welcome illegal migrants as it previously had. Moving forward, the city will warn non-citizen immigrants that there is “no guarantee” they will be able to access shelter or other city services if they try to come to New York.

As part of this about-face, the city is distributing bilingual fliers at the crossing points along the U.S.–Mexico border designed to dissuade crossers from coming to New York. The fliers warn migrants that the city is a Dickensian nightmare where “housing” is “very expensive” and “the cost of food, transportation, and other necessities” is “the highest in the United States.” The fliers “do not convey much compassion,” the Times observed. But they do not discourage illegal immigration altogether, either. They instead suggest that border crossers “consider another city” when deciding “where to settle in the U.S.”

Those intrepid migrants who still brave both the trek north and the city’s exorbitant costs of living face uncertain conditions in a major metro that is no longer so welcoming. The city must still abide by a court precedent compelling it to offer shelter to those who need it, but Adams is right that it’s full-up. There are roughly 55,000 migrants still in the custody of city officials. Combined with the over 100,000 homeless in city shelters and with thousands of new migrant arrivals on a weekly basis, the city’s migrant-housing sites and human-relief centers are maxed out.

Having reluctantly come to terms with these practical realities, the mayor is receiving no small amount of grief from activists who believe the application of immigration law is irredeemably cruel. It is difficult, however, to summon much sympathy for Adams. For years, he and his political allies waxed sanctimonious about the humanitarian mission upon which the nation’s sanctuary cities had embarked. And when they weren’t trying to shame their critics into silence, they dismissed summarily anyone who raised the same practical considerations that are now, all of a sudden, prohibitive.

When asked during a 2021 mayoral debate if they would preserve then-mayor Bill de Blasio’s sanctuary policies, each of the eight Democratic candidates vying to replace him said they would. Indeed, in Adams’s estimation, preserving a policy of stonewalling immigration-enforcement officials was nothing less than a moral imperative. “My mother worked two jobs to provide for the six of us and we had a group of undocumented residents that lived in our community,” said then-candidate Adams in support of the program. As the Democratic nominee for mayor, Adams promised that New York City would continue to limit its cooperation with federal authorities on matters of immigration law, even when confronted with the program’s material and human costs. “We should protect our immigrants,” he said.

The following year, after Adams took the oath of office, Republican lawmakers in America’s border states decided to test the new mayor’s commitment to lawlessness. On August 5, 2022, Texas governor Gregg Abbott announced that the first of what would be a series of successive busloads of illegal migrants was on its way to New York City. “This is horrific, when you think about what the governor is doing,” Adams railed. New York’s immigrant-affairs officials agreed that the governor’s program was “cruel,” while promising that the city would still provide all the “resources and support” the incoming migrants needed. But those resources were already strained by the ongoing influx of other migrants into the city, and Adams was subsequently forced to devote outsize attention to his municipality’s migrant problem.

Adams sought relief from the Biden administration to continue ignoring federal law-enforcement officials. He announced “Project Open Arms,” a program designed to provide taxpayer-funded educational assistance to the families of asylum seekers “in and out of the city’s shelter system” so the city’s undocumented school-age children wouldn’t be entirely unsupervised when the schoolyear began. But in September, Adams admitted that the city had reached its “breaking point.” The following month, he declared a city-wide emergency, announcing that “more people are arriving in New York City than we can immediately accommodate.” Nevertheless, he continued to insist that “New York City will remain a sanctuary city” under his leadership.

By Christmas, he had had enough. “We’ve done our job,” he said. “There’s no more room at the inn.” By January of this year, Adams revealed that the cost of the city’s migrant services was set to balloon to a staggering $2 billion. “Our cities are being undermined,” he declared, placing blame for the problem on the Democrats in the executive branch who would not bail him out. “We don’t deserve this.” That month, the mayor even traveled to the U.S.–Mexico border to see the crisis for himself. And yet he continued to defend the sanctuary-city policy. “We have no more room, but we’re still finding spaces [to] accommodate” migrants,” he explained. “That is our law, that is our obligation, and that is what’s morally right.”

With few other recourses remaining, Adams himself consented to busing illegal migrants out of his city and into New York’s suburbs, forcing the counties of Rockland and Orange to declare their own states of emergency. In an appearance on CBS News, he distributed the blame for these suboptimal conditions across the American political spectrum — to Republican governors, Republicans in Congress, the Biden administration, and elected officials in New York City’s suburbs. The only person not responsible for the drawbacks associated with New York’s sanctuary-city policy, it seems, was the mayor who’d inherited and stubbornly maintained it.

The logic of Adams’ complaints about the effect of his city’s sanctuary policies has now, finally, become inescapable. His reversal not only affirms the wisdom and efficacy of the migrant-busing programs adopted by both Republican and Democratic governors on the frontlines of America’s migration crisis. It also exposes the hollowness of the mayor’s efforts to emotionally blackmail his critics into shutting up. Adams does deserve some modest credit for, at long last, cutting his city’s losses. The sooner his fellow “sanctuary city” mayors follow his lead, the sooner they might spare themselves some of the embarrassment that he himself is now enduring.